Aaron Bell
American Philosophy, Phil 520
Dr. Scott Pratt
30 November 2004
Precis II - Putnam
Ethics Without Ontology
Since its dawn, philosophy has longed for practical solutions to the controversial ethical disagreements of everyday life. Throughout this struggle, thinkers have traditionally sought, for better or for worse, to provide a strategy for ethics that is objectively rooted in a type of ontology. Pragmatic philosopher Hilary Putnam rejects the need for an ontology altogether. After emphasizing how ontologically based theories are not helpful in identifying practical ethics, such as those appealing to one single human concern (e.g., sympathy) or to one single set of concepts (e.g., Platonic forms, or abstract identities), he argues for a system of ethics that can still stand objectively alone (p3).
In his work, “Ethics Without Ontology”, Hilary Putnam deconstructs the supposed objectivity of both mathematics and logic, and defends the reasonableness and objectiveness of ethical (-value) judgments. In this maneuver he shows how learned common sense will help coordinate a sense of convention for constructing axioms of empirical knowledge (e.g., notions of object and existence). This construction, made possible by convention, is what Putnam terms, Conceptual Relativity. Conceptual Relativity, which is naturally pluralistic and of its own optional language, provides the basis for a strategy of ethics, regardless of issues of ontology.
Lastly, Putnam claims that there have been three enlightenment periods, where each new period of enlightenment has offered a revolutionarily new system of convention, which, in turn, dictates a new Conceptual Relativity. Putnam is in the business of addressing practical problems and the project of this text is to show how the ‘pragmatic enlightenment,’ fueled by John Dewey, provides the most reasonable method for addressing such ethical disagreements. It will be my job to show you both how this is possible and how its rejection of (an) ontology necessarily demands pluralism.
I will first mention, albeit briefly, how Putnam defines ‘ethics’. For him, the term ‘ethics’ is understood as a system of principles - “a system of interrelated concerns, concerns which [are seen] as mutually supporting but also in partial tension” (22). He acknowledges that there are many operational definitions of ethics out there, many of which share common interpretations and serve as presuppositions of ethics - for example, those involving the idea of sacrificing the self for the betterment of the community, or those upholding the ideals of courage and prowess as virtues. But what Putnam seems to embrace most is “the emphasis on alleviating suffering regardless of the class or gender of the sufferer” (23). Putnam is clearly drawn to this as an attractive model for ethics, a universal ethical equality of sorts. It is from here, now, that we will move forward and engage Putnam’s argument.
To eventually reject ontology, Putnam must first provide its definition. He begins by distinguishing the word ‘ontology’ from it’s Heideggerian influence, and describes it in its more traditional, metaphysical outfit, “the science of being” (17). With this there are three ontological views, each worth rejecting: inflationary, reductionism and eliminationism.
The inflationary ontological view “claims to tell us of the existence of things unknown to ordinary sense perception and to common sense” (17). For Plato, issues of ethical value and obligation were explained by the “Theory of Forms.” For G. E. Moore, ethical judgments were made in conjunction to a non-natural, supersensible quality called “good” (18). This form of ontology requires a special intuition, or relation to a higher ethical knowledge on the part of the philosopher, and “reduces all ethical phenomena, all ethical problems, all ethical questions, indeed all value problems, to just one issue, the presence or absence of this single super-thing” (19); which is a commitment to monism.
Reductionist and eliminationist ontologies are both a type of deflation. Where inflationary ontology magnifies the importance of ontological claims to an all knowing source of answers (God, the Forms, good, etc), these two deflationary ontologies are to de-emphasize our initial ethical disagreements. Reductionist ontologies claim “ethical utterances are nothing but expressions of feelings” (20). They reduce ethical dilemmas from what they seem to be, to what they, supposedly, ‘really’ are. Eliminationist ontologies make the claim that what seems to be an ethical problem really is nothing at all. It’s “aim is to show us that we are talking about mythical entities” (21).
Putnam explains that these continental approaches to ontology have failed to provide a practical solution for dealing with ethical problems. One applies to a monistic higher authority that is only available to a select few; the others essentially deny a person access to tangible problem-solving techniques by displacing the ethical issues at hand. Putnam admits, “ontology in all three of the forms I distinguished in my opening lecture - inflationary, reductionist, and eliminationist - has been a failure” (78). Further, Putnam calls us to simply realize that the there is no “single, unified theory of the world” (81) and, more sensibly, he states:
“the whole collection of human languages now in existence illustrates how many ways there are of ‘quantifying’ in the process of describing very simple situations, situations as simple as someone’s pulling a branch aside. The whole idea that the world dictates a unique ‘true’ way of dividing the world into objects, situations, properties, etc., is a piece of philosophical parochialism. But just that parochialism is and always has been behind the subject called Ontology” (51)
Putnam continues. He mentions how Quine was the first philosopher to establish ‘ontology’ as a respectable subject in analytic philosophy the moment he (Quine) published his famous paper titled, “On What There Is” in 1948. Quine’s claim, essentially, rested on the premise that “it is only our best scientific theory of the world that says anything we can take seriously about what there is” (84), including issues of ethics. Putnam is quick to show how our so-called ‘best’ scientific theories, established by past enlightenment periods, provide ‘misguided’ Ontological explanations for their objectivity (3). That is to say, the objectivity in mathematics and logic is not coming from ontological claims, but, rather, from within their own respective languages. On this, Putnam defines and challenges the notion of what is meant by ‘objective,’ and, before exploring the objectivity of logic and of mathematics, let us do the same.
Objectivity is derived from the philosophical idea that there must be objects to which the objectivity claim ‘corresponds’ and “if there are no obvious natural objects whose properties would make the claim true, then there must be some non-natural objects to play the role of ‘truth-maker’” (52). This notion is fervent among the three forms of ontology stated earlier, and is the reason why ontology and objectivity have gone hand-in-hand for so long. Further, Putnam explains that in accepting this idea, one will most likely be willing to accept a third, “the idea that if a claim is true, then the claim is a description of whatever object and properties make it true” (52). This being the case, the average person will regard whatever s/he believes to be objectively true as merely a description. The line of thinking here is that if someone struggles to satisfy his/her descriptions with natural objects and/or properties, then s/he will be forced to construe the descriptions with reference to non-natural entities (53). This is the very line of thinking that Putnam believes is completely mistaken and misguided.
He argues for the possibility of there being a thing, which serves as a truth, that is not a description of some object(s). His first example is of logic. He presents the following simple logical inference:
If all platypus are egg-laying mammals, then it follows that,
Anything that is not an egg-laying mammal is not a platypus.
On this, he admits that one could call this a description, but Putnam explains that when we use simple logical inferences (above), we are pointing out the validity of the relation between statements, not literally describing a certain relation between intangible objects. Putnam explains, “logic is neither a description of non-natural relations between transcendent ‘objects’ nor a description of ordinary empirical properties of empirical objects” (59). In this case, we have an example where a given statement is true (the validity of the structure is true), but cannot be understood as a description of objects (the ‘validity of the structure’ cannot to be understood as a description of an object). At best, this is what many philosophers of science have long called a pseudo-explanation (implying a lack of surplus meaning & fruitfulness, as explained on p60).
Another example worth highlighting is where Putnam speaks briefly, and confusingly so, about Quine’s assumptions on tautologies. He says:
“And since a Tarskian ‘truth definition’ provides no general notion of truth, but only an infinite series of different notions, … then Quine’s definition of validity, presupposing, as it does, that Tarski has provided a purely extensional explanation of the predicate ‘true,’ likewise provides only an infinite series of different notions of validity, … and not a single notion ‘valid’ applicable to statements in an arbitrary language” (58).
With this, Putnam arrives at a very relevant conclusion: one cannot validate notions of truth outside of a given, particular language. Above is a case where the importance and meaningfulness of the truth and/or falsehood of a given statement is largely dependent on its own language, and is, thus, untranslatable between arbitrary languages.
Some things, now, seem to exist as objective without need of a description (e.g., logical statements), while other seemingly similar things cannot share descriptions since they necessarily belong to their own language (e.g., Tarskian vs. Quinian). Here, Putman has shown some of the misguided reasons for which objectivity has appealed to ontology for so long. However, although ontology has attempted to provide the non-natural reference needed as a description for (objective) things, Putnam has helped us to see the separation that can be made between Ontology and objectivity. I should carefully mention that removing the need for ontological ‘descriptions’ from objectivity is not the same as to dismiss the possibility of objectivity. To maintain that statements in logic are correct, and to uphold objectivity in general, Putman explains a new term, conceptual truth.
Though limited as a full explanation, conceptual truth for Putnam is an corrigible interpretation of sorts, it is a truth that “is impossible to make (relevant) sense of the assertion of its negation” (61). For example, ‘2+2 = 4’ and the logic inference involving platypuses (above) are both conceptual truths. He mentions that our acceptance/denials of conceptual truth come from within one’s body of beliefs and one’s conceptual connections. Conveniently, this definition recognizes the interpenetration of conceptual truth and empirical description, which allows for the possibility for a scientific revolution to overthrow one’s belief system from which one’s original notions of truth were substantiated.
The limit that Putnam speaks of is in regard to three things. First, not all logical truths are conceptual truths in the sense we previously discussed; some necessarily need proofs. Second, there is no way to provide a non-empirical guarantee that our conceptual truths will not some day fail to a new empirical finding. And third, “to know what it is for something to be a logical truth, it is not enough to be familiar with a few examples of self-evident logical truth, … but one must have some familiarity with logical justification” (64). Essentially, Putnam is reminding us that one learns logic, and that the value of conceptual truths is, in part, due to a progressive and accumulative learning attitude. This is how Putnam defends conceptual truths, and in doing so, revives our ability to arrive at objective truth without necessitating description. If you recall, while providing examples for conceptual truth, Putnam included a mathematical term. We have concluded our talk of logic, it is only right that we address mathematics, in short, as well.
On the topic of mathematical truth, Putnam has this to say: “we learn what mathematical truth is by learning the practices and standards of mathematics itself, including the practices of applying mathematics” (66). Mathematical truth strongly resembles logical truth (67), and Putnam certainly emphasizes mathematics as having its own language to boot. The objectivity of mathematics lies within this language, within its own structure, and to determine its conceptual truth is to learn of its practices and applications. Incidentally, Putnam explains how, on one hand, much of contemporary science, namely physics, is supported by use of mathematical theorems as objective truths, while, on the other hand, “nothing supports taking mathematical theorems as a description of a special realm of ‘abstract entities,’ and nothing is gained, in philosophy of mathematics or elsewhere, by so doing” (67). This he adds so as to confirm and emphasize the stability with which mathematics has maintained throughout the centuries - all on its own objective terms!
On this note, Putnam has successfully pulled objectivity away from its dependence on ontology. He has deconstructed the issues of objectivity within mathematics and logic, leaving each to maintain their own objectivity without homage to ontological ideals, but within their own language and certifiably so by way of conceptual truth. At this point, Putnam would wish to emphasize that he is in the business of “rejecting the widespread belief that ethical judgments lack objectivity” (3). Looking more closely at how Putnam defends the reasonableness and objectivity of ethical judgments, we will determine how Putnam provides a method for ethics without ontology.
Putnam’s system of ethics seems to focus around an ideal that has had ontologists scratching their heads for years. This notion is termed, Conceptual Relativity. The real goal with Putnam is to provide a method of ethics that would allow groups of people to join perspectives and address legitimate practical problems. Conceptual relativity achieves just that. We will define it shortly, but first let us arrive at what is meant by ‘convention’.
In a world of many individuals, discrepancies on how to see the world emerge. Putnam uses a great analogy to ‘mereological sums’ to support this idea. The mereological sum is an analogy for things that exist in the world. It takes a world of three objects (x1, x2 and x3) and shows you how there are several legitimate, equally possible worlds that a person could construct with regards to these same three objects (x1, x2, x3, x1+x2, x1+x3, x2+x3, and x1+x2+x3). Unable to determine which of these sums ‘exists’ more than another, since each is equally plausible, a strategy is needed to determine which construction is right for you. The simple act of choosing is what Putnam calls ‘convention’ - “it is literally a matter of convention whether we decide to say they exist” (43).
Symbols aside, with so much potential and equally viable variance in the world, it is out of convention that we choose between multiple and equal options - in much the same way that it is out of pure convention that the British drive on the left side of the road, and Americans drive on the right; same problem, different but equally good resolution. For Putnam, “a convention is simply a solution to a certain kind of coordination problem” (44). When we come to a dilemma, we exercise our common sense, take into account our natural language, “the language that we all speak and cannot avoid speaking every day” (43), and choose the most ‘conventional’ means. Putnam reminds us that, “while there is an element of convention in all knowledge, there is no guarantee that anything we call a convention won’t someday have to be given up, perhaps for a reason we are totally unable to foresee now” (44). But in the meantime, this is a perfectly good strategy for making judgments, or more specifically, choosing between specifiable ways of using words (45). This is what is meant by constructive relativism - “the possibility of different extensions of our ordinary notions of object and existence” (49).
There are differing ways of formalizing the possible extensions of our ordinary ways of speaking (43); this formalizing is called ‘optional language’. Optional language is used to mediate between options, but it has no ability to choose or give preference. In review, the way one chooses is by convention, which is in direct response to your own learned common sense. This process all together is conceptual relativism. Putnam notes:
“[All the examples] of conceptual relativity so far mentioned … all involve statements that appear to be contradictory … but are not in fact contradictory, if we understand each of them as belonging to a different optional language, and recognize that the two optional languages involve the choice of incompatible conventions. What are ‘incompatible’ are not the statements themselves, which cannot simply be conjoined, but the conventions” (46).
Every relation, every definition, everything within a specific conceptual relativity is thought to be its own self-supporting, objective language - much like mathematics, logic, etc. There being multiple optional languages and room for differing conventions demands that there be multiple conceptual relativities. This, by nature, gives way to what Putnam calls conceptual pluralism. He says, “that we can use [multiple] schemes without being required to reduce one or both of them to some single fundamental and universal ontology is the doctrine of pluralism” (49). Conceptual relativity necessarily implies pluralism. This scheme, as a whole, provides the necessary basis for a strategy of ethics without ontology.
Putnam leaves us with some historical relevance for these claims. His views emerge from the third of three enlightenment periods. The first was what he terms the Platonic enlightenment, where Plato and Socrates helped instill a type of reflective transcendence (e.g., ‘standing back’) and worked to establish early conceptions of justice and critical thinking. The second enlightenment is what most people refer to as the Enlightenment. Lead by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and the likes, this era involved the emergence of theories of ‘social contract’ and of ‘natural rights’ and was witness to the introduction of a ‘new science’ (e.g., Newton and the scientific method, p93). The third enlightenment, however still in progress, is what he terms as the ‘pragmatic enlightenment.’
Fueled by John Dewey, the so-called third enlightenment provides the most reasonable method for addressing ethical disagreements. For Putnam, “enlightenments are simultaneously revolutions in our epistemological thinking and in our ethical thinking” (5). I think Putnam would say that with each new enlightenment, a new system of convention is offered, and with each new convention is a new potential to reform the way we deal with practical problems. Dewey rejects the social contract ideals of the second enlightenment and pushes for the belief that morally decent communities should be democratic (104). Dewey, as does Putnam, believes that “only in a democracy does everyone have a chance to make his or her contribution to the discussion” (105). If the real goal of ethics, as proposed by Putnam, is to require individuals to be learned and to seek knowledge so as to better contribute to the ethical conversation, than the challenge of the third enlightenment is to treat ethics as a learning process (125). Putnam’s ethics without ontology necessarily follows suit, if not leads the way.
Putnam has provided a theory of ethics that is as pluralistic as possible. I am inextricably drawn to wonder about ‘optional languages’. Like Putnam, I think of Davidson’s “The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” and the question of how languages are affected after translation. Again, like Putnam, I believe that both languages are necessarily affected. The idea of translatability seems to demand that both languages compromise a (portion of a?) conceptual scheme, and in so doing, necessarily create a new perspective. After deliberating about the Shawnee, Putnam raises the issue that, “the conceptual scheme of English is constantly being enriched by interactions with other languages, as well as specific, artistic, etc., creations” (50), and I completely agree.
But what I wonder is, considering the current rate of language translatability on an international scale, who’s to know how quickly other optional languages can emerge? Of all the terms in Putnam’s theory of ethics, optional languages seem to include the fewest variety, and this allows his method to be somewhat manageable. If optional languages were to grow to be nearly as numerous as conventions, or as broad as common sense, I can’t help but be fearful that Putnam has allowed for an ‘every man for himself’ scenario. I understand this is a bit extreme, but I’m still left wondering how he proposes to control for that.
All in all, we should be applauding Hilary Putnam’s work in “Ethics Without Ontology”. He has provided a credible historical assessment of past strategies for ethics. He has defined and proposed three periods of enlightenment. He has given our current era a charge for and a challenge to approach development and progress via a process of learning. And on top of it all, he has provided a strong system of ethics that convincingly rejects ontology and, arguably, successfully provides a new approach to dealing with practical ethical disagreements. For this we should be thankful. However, for this, we should also keep one eyebrow raised.